Anytime I write about education policy, I get myself into trouble. But when I finished reading today’s Wall Street Journal article on “custom” textbooks and thought, “this is unbelievable”, I knew it was only a matter of minutes before I reached for my computer to write this post.
It seems that a “custom textbook” is one of the more recently developed techniques through which our institutions of higher learning are short-changing our students. A custom textbook is apparently a widely produced text book, which is "customized" for a university by including freely available information, perhaps a different, customized binding, and often stamped, “This book may not be bought or sold used”. In other respects, many of these text books are identical to the ones that are distributed as non-customized. No matter that the prohibition on resale is acknowledged to be legally unenforceable, our schools think this is sufficient to deter most of the students from re-selling their custom books. So, from the point of view of selling more books, this is mission accomplished.
Adding insult to this injury, the books are priced higher than the non-customized versions (which have the same substantive text) and the educational institutions for which the books have been customized have contracted to share in the proceeds from the sale of these books! That’s right, our colleges have conspired with privately owned, for profit, publishers to charge their students an artificially high price for textbooks, which the schools require their students to buy, and then block the students ability to sell his or her book, once used, or to buy a used copy.
To be sure, many universities who originally found this fund raising gimmick attractive, have rethought their original position, and decided that cheating their students was not the right thing to do. I hope the rest of our educational establishment will quickly follow suit.
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